Conventional approaches to access customer satisfaction information generally use standard survey forms or questionnaires by mail or telephone. A survey participant may be mailed a standard survey form to complete and return by mail or an agent of the provider may call a participant so that the survey questions may be answered over the telephone.
However, these methods of performing surveys are inaccurate and inefficient, often taking considerable time to collect and process the information. For example, a traditional direct mail survey may take more than 100 days before a provider reviews a final report and the survey participants may not even be recent users of the products or services. A direct mail process normally determines a random survey sample from a customer data base provided by disk from the product or service provider. An initial seven to fourteen days may be allowed for sending a pre-notification letter and a direct mailing of the survey to each survey participant. Then, reminder cards to complete the survey are sent to non-respondents after ten days with a second direct mailing being sent after an additional thirty days. Once the direct mail effort is completed, telephone interviews may also be performed to meet the response rate quota. A final report is only sent to the product or service provider two to three weeks after attaining the required response rate quota.
Furthermore, although computers are likely to be used to analyze the survey data, human agents are still typically used to enter the data into a computer or to perform the actual survey questioning in both traditional mail and telephone surveys. Unfortunately, human agents are expensive to hire, increasing survey costs, and humans often make mistakes, leading to survey inaccuracies.
One possible solution involves using computer-operated surveys where the participant uses the touch-tone feature of a telephone to enter replies to questions. Such a system, however, seems impersonal to the participant, often leads to mistakes if the participant forgets the key/answer mapping, and is limited to the use of touchtone telephones. Such a solution also does not provide an adequate means to obtain actual participant verbal responses to questions. Actual recorded verbal responses have the advantage of capturing the participant's subjective tone and emotional state, as well as capturing the participant's objective opinion.
It would be advantageous to automate the survey process to reduce the number of human beings utilized in the survey process, to increase the accuracy, reduce the costs, improve the efficiencies, and overcome the shortcomings of current techniques identified above. Modem computer and networking technology provides potential solutions to these problems. Advances in voice recognition, database design, computer processing, and computer networking all provide means to improve the process of performing a survey.
In addition, because all survey participants tend to be asked the same pre-determined list of questions, little insight into the particular reasons behind the answers are typically available. Conventional means of solving this problem may involve having a longer, more complex survey or having the participant state a reason for his or her answer. However, the provider of a survey assessment may only be interested in detailed reasons behind an answer in particular situations, such as when a participant is very dissatisfied with a service or product, while the same provider may not care why a survey participant was satisfied with a different service or product. A longer complex survey causes a participant to become frustrated at the relevancy and time commitment involved in completing the survey, thus, encouraging the participant not to complete the survey fully or to end the survey prematurely. Likewise, processing stated “reasons” using standard techniques can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
Conventional written surveys attempt to solve this process, for example, by telling a participant to “skip section X if you answered ‘no’ to question Y” or to “complete section Q only if you answered ‘poor’ to question T”. Telephone or surveys often require the survey agent to follow similar instructions. This can be confusing and frustrating to participants and agents alike, often leading to errors or incomplete surveys. More sophisticated, automated survey techniques that depend on neither the participant nor the agent's understanding of the survey structure would be advantageous.
Accordingly, an adaptable survey questioning procedure would be useful, one that determines the depth of questioning on certain topics depending on the answers given to questions on that topic, and that utilizes computer technology to process verbal replies. Better utilization of modem computers and software and the reduction in the reliance of human agents on performing the survey questioning would be beneficial to the product and service providers and the survey participants, as well as any agents performing the surveys.